Breaking Through: My Life in Science

by Katalin Karikó

I’d never paid much attention to rowing before. Until now, I’d never noticed that rowers move backward. This means they can’t see where they are heading as they row. The only person in the boat who can see the finish line is a small coxswain who faces the rowers, directs their efforts, and steers the boat. Because Susan couldn’t see the finish line, she had little sense of where she was in relation to it. There could be no calibrating her distance, no reassuring herself that she was almost there, no pacing herself to save something for the end. With every stroke, she simply had to go as hard as she possibly could. It reminded me of my experiments, the way I never had a sense of whether a breakthrough would come or how long it would take. I simply had to trust that hard work, if I gave it my all, would get me somewhere, eventually.